H All,

say I wanted to make a glowing / pulsating orb, how would I go about creating it with a material ? Would I have to use a combination of a light within an object + material or something else ?

How about if I wanted to do this on a model, say something like E.T.'s glowing finger thing ?

Thanks, any help tutes much appreciated !

There are a lot of different glowing effects so it will be useful for you to post an image of the effect you are going for.

In general though glowing effects in A:M can be done well using surface properties combined with Ambience.
For example:

- Create a small object (extrude a patch, lathe a spline or otherwise create a simple mesh)
- Crack open the Surface properties and change the Glow property to 'On'.
- Select an Ambience Color and percentage.
- Drop that Model into a Choreography
- In the Choreography properties you can adjust the percentage of the glow
- You can also animate the color and strength of the glow over time in an Action/Chor Action

Try that and post your results.

While this example uses standard Surface properties you can do the same thing with Materials.
Keep it simple though. Materials can take longer to calculate and render so keep it simple first.

Ok I'll try it . . .

I although had good results with transparent cookiepatchimages, a aim at camera-constraint and a few patches shaped like the border of the objects.
This is easier to control and can be very powerful.

*Fuchur*

Fuchur brings up another method to approach glow effects and there are still others.
The look you are after may dictate the approach you want to take.

I read in another topic for instance that you are looking to blow planets up.
For such an effect you should break each element down into to basic components and add together what works best.

There are two tutorials by Jeff Paries that might prove effective and suit your needs.
One uses a material effector to disintegrate a planet while the other generates an exploding ring.

We might be going a bit off topic so I'll just point you to this link. (Mike Cossey even has a few project files there)

Hey guys, just to let you know - I made a pretty cool looking Earth model ! Now for the blowing up bit ! - Unfortunately a preview render is taking me like 9 hours to do . . . I'll post it up when its done . . . next is doing the explosion thing - I don't even want to think how long this will take . . . . thanks for those links Rodney - they have been most helpful ! Its just experimentation and more experimentation - which costs in time ! Where are those open cl thingies . . . .

v15(i) has already OpenMP in it which will speed up previewrenderings (not final so) for PC... dont know if it works for Macs too...
Have a look at this infos about that: OpenMP Infos

Steffen implemented some of the functions in A:M with OpenMP. The green-Previewrendering-button for example works at least twice as fast on Multicore-processors (about 220% faster than singlecore at my quadcore) and the same is true for finding-patchesalgorithm (which was the reason for Steffen to have a look into the subject).

Some people have trouble with that, so you will find an option in the optionsdialog for turning this feature on or off.
*Fuchur*

Cool ! On the note of those Jeff Paries tutes - I'm having a hard time to decipher them since they were done in AM 98, a lot of the notes which relate to various settings in the properties are non existent in V.15 of AM - I can't get the light to create a lens flare, I CAN get the cylinder to scale and stuff - but it doesn't look like the screen shot in the tute and doesn't work so . . I'll start another thread . . .

Check here in the tutorials forum for Holmes Bryant's tutorials.
I'm pretty sure he brings those tutorials up to date.

Regarding long render times....



Don't forget, for most use on the internet (and tests) you can get away with some pretty low resolution renders!
Don't fall for that 'ol 'waste all your free time' rendering that was popular in the past.
Render low res... and when you see something worth rendering bigger... render to higher rez (while you are sleeping or off taking a break).

Check where ?

Isn't it odd that even as we do the conversion to HDTV , we are watching more lower res footage than even before on the interenet.

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showforum=175